Keeping Your Eye In the Ball

Sports stadiums are filled with cameras, especially football stadiums which not only have mounted camera surrounding the field but also suspended above the players on a system to quickly move the camera around. Now researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo have found another place to place a camera; within the football itself.

The researchers embedded a narrow field of view camera within a foam football which would capture images as the ball spawn through the air. Looking at the raw footage of the camera gives a whirl of images showing the sky, stands, and field, but with some special algorithms the images of the sky are removed while the other images are merged together, creating a wide angle video. Much of the distortion from the different angles the images are taken at has even been removed, and with more work and a better sensor the researchers believe they may be able to remove it entirely.

Of course the BallCam is not going to be suited for the Super Bowl, but it could potentially be used for training and for some interesting action shots in movies and TV.